Congratulations are in order for MACHINE HEAD drummer Dave McClain, who just married his Australian girlfriend Belle. The couple live in Alameda, California.

This is the second marriage for McClain, a former member of Arizona thrashers SACRED REICH who joined MACHINE HEAD in 1995 following the departure of Chris Kontos.

In a January 2012 interview with Examiner.com, McClain stated about the touring life: “Personally, I love it. It’s been part of my life for 21 years now, so I love pretty much everything about being out [on the road]. Doing shows, hanging out and doing our thing and doing what we love, it’s a good life.”

He continued: “When I’m stuck at home for some time, that’s when I start feeling a little caged up or something, but not really being in the studio. As long as we’re doing something band-related… I used to kind of just learn to like everything about it. It’s cool if you’re recording, just soak everything in and get back on the road. And that’s when the fun begins.”

MACHINE HEAD will enter the studio later this year to begin recording the follow-up to 2011’s “Unto The Locust” for an early 2014 release.

KidsInterviewBands.com, a video interview series hosted by 7th-graders Olivia and Connie, conducted an interview with Josh Homme and Dean Fertita of QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE on September 15 at The LC in Columbus, Ohio. You can now watch the chat below.

According to KidsInterviewBands.com, Olivia and Connie “are active in sports and other activities that typical 7th-graders enjoy. They aren’t sure if they want to make a living interviewing bands, but they are having a lot of fun getting the chance to talk to all the great artists who have agreed to sit down and chat with them.”

QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE‘s latest album, “…Like Clockwork”, sold 91,000 copies in the United States in its first week of release to land at position No. 1 on The Billboard 200 chart. Issued on June 4 via Matador Records, the disc follows up “Era Vulgaris”, which opened with 52,000 units back in June 2007 to enter the chart at No. 14. The band’s 2005 offering “Lullabies to Paralyze” registered a first-week tally of nearly 97,000 copies, to debut at No. 5.

In the first of a two-part series of guest lessons, ROB ZOMBIE and ex-MARILYN MANSON guitarist John 5 (real name: John William Lowery) takes U.K.’s Total Guitar magazine on a shortcut to shred mastery. Check out the footage below.

John 5 recently spoke to Artisan News about his forthcoming solo album, an all-star affair which is tentatively due in 2014.

“Rob Zombie is obviously my priority, and everything I do is just when he’s doing a movie or something like that,” he said. “And you know, I never play live with anyone else, I never tour, ’cause I never wanna confuse anyone. I’m just a writer. So as soon as they see a credit — ‘Oh, John 5 wrote on this Ricky Martin song,’ or whatever like that — then that will… So it doesn’t really get in the way. But I love doing my instrumental records and people really enjoy ’em, so I’m always working on those. I’m working on one right now. I’ve got Elton John‘s bass player doing stuff. I mean, I have a bunch of guest stars on this one, so it’s gonna be really good.”

Regarding how his upcoming album will be different from his last effort, 2012’s “God Told Me To”, John 5 said: “The last one was half acoustic, half electric and I always like to change it up, so this one, I’m just gonna have a bunch of guest stars. So I’m gonna start asking my friends for favors and all this stuff. ‘Hey, come on in. I watched your house and I let your dog out that one time, so come play on my record.’ So I’m gonna start my long list of people to come and play. I think it’s fun.”

He continued: “These albums are a lot of fun. I just do ’em for the love of guitar and to inspire a couple of people on the way… I just really enjoy doing that. It’s great. It was one of the smartest things I’ve ever done. Right when I left MANSON, I was, like, ‘OK, so I guess I’ll finally make my instrumental record.’ And it did really well, and I’m on my sixth one. And I don’t do them for money or anything — I just do them for the love of the guitar — and I think the audience really can see that. I’ll do something like a Chet Atkins song and then some crazy death metal-type song. So it’s a very wide range of music; there’s no format and there’s no rules.”

Peter Hodgson of IHeartGuitarBlog.com recently conducted an interview with ALTER BRIDGE guitarist Mark Tremonti. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

IHeartGuitarBlog.com: I’ve been checking out the new album [“Fortress”] and man, this one is heavy.

Tremonti: Yeah! It’s the fun one!

IHeartGuitarBlog.com: Where did that come from? I mean, there are thrash elements here, for cryin’ out loud.

Tremonti: Well, when we got together to put the initial ideas together, me and Myles [Kennedy, vocals] kept in mind that we had to play these songs every night and we wanted to make the album entertaining to perform, so we made ’em all high-energy songs. And once we got about two thirds done with the record, we realized that if we didn’t put some dynamics in the record, no matter how heavy you make it, it’s not going to make it’s not going to be as good as a record. That’s when we switched gears.

IHeartGuitarBlog.com: So you actually had a plan, rather than just all these heavy riffs coming together?

Tremonti: Me and Myles get together and we play each other all of our favourite ideas and we piece our ideas together to get a broad outline of what the record’s going to look like, and then we get together with Brian [Marshall] and Scott [Phillips] and piece together a closer arrangement. Once we had about 14 or 15 songs, we went into pre-production and that’s when we take our arrangements and challenge them as much as we can. We tore them apart many, many times to get them where they are now. We didn’t want people to be able to guess where the song was going. We wanted to catch them by surprise.

IHeartGuitarBlog.com: I wanted to ask you about the arrangements because there’s some really intricate stuff here, and each time you listen you’ll hear different details.

Tremonti: A lot of it, especially in “Cry Of Achilles” or “Fortress” where we really threw everything we had at it, we’d just sit there throwing ideas back and forth: let’s change a time signature here, change a key here, completely change the vibe of the song here and try to get back on our feet in the next section. And a lot of the time, it gets frustrating because sometimes you think you’re onto something good, but you can’t get out of it and then you have to start over again. But we just didn’t want to rest on our laurels and think that our arrangements were fine. We wanted to put every effort into it, and we spent about three times longer on pre-production for this record than we ever spent on a record before. We go into the studio with a good picture of what we want, and then when we got to the preproduction that’s when we made what we wanted a little better.

We've had a lot of fun at Dave Mustaine's expense. To be fair, he makes it real easy for us. We've created a whole sub-section of the site dedicated to his fantastic quotes. The problem with Dave, in my eyes, is that he is not-at-all self-aware. Take for example what he said in a recent …

Ohio’s Fun in the Morgue (not to be confused with the Swiss band Fun at the Morgue) has checked in with the following announcement about returning with a new lineup: So, long time no talk corpses. We’ve been working hard putting the pieces back together after our untimely annex from our previous members

Troy Culpan of May The Rock Be With You recently conducted an interview with former METALLICA, VOIVOD and FLOTSAM AND JETSAM bassist and current NEWSTED frontman Jason Newsted. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

May The Rock Be With You: So why was now the right time to unleash NEWSTED on the world?

Jason: Destiny chose it, man. There was no plan, I swear to God. I just went in to make this little demo tape, and somebody heard “Soldierhead” and it took off,and the next thing you know, we’ve got a world tour and managers and all that stuff. I swear to God. I never, ever, ever, ever planned on having a big band again, or putting my name on it or anything — it just happened — and people said, “Go for it,” and kept encouraging me. And actually, I went to play with the METALLICA guys at the end of 2011 and I got all excited about playing again, I wrote some songs, gave them to my buddies, we turned them into something. Next thing you know, it’s eighteen months later and I’m talking to you. I was never, like, “Here’s going to be the logo and this is going to be the thing and we’re gonna do this and gonna do that” — there was never any of that. I’ve mostly just been playing catch-up for the last eight months, from the managers and agents that booked me a bunch of shows before I really even had a band together, before I even had the fourth member of the band, they booked me a bunch of shows just because they knew I was coming back out and people were excited about it.

May The Rock Be With You: This is your first time fronting a band. What is it like being the singer after so many years of well, not…?

Jason: It’s a little bit scary and it’s also really fun. I think that even all the drummers in the world and even the guy on violin in the back, everybody wants to be the frontman at some point, no matter what they say [laughs], I think they want that, we all crave it a little bit, because everybody wants to be a show-off in this business. You’ve got to have that ego and want to show off and that’s kind of what the deal is. Early days in FLOTSAM AND JETSAM, I sang in FLOTSAM AND JETSAM and fronted the band before we had a singer and through time and with METALLICA, it was one verse of that song, another verse in that song, a couple of years later a few more verses, and by the end of it, I was singing a whole song, so I’ve built up that way little by little. As far as a vocalist playing bass and laying it all down like that, it’s a very new territory and there’s a lot of new roles to assume, so I’m mostly taking it as a challenge. Nervous excitement comes pretty quick when I know that the chips are down and I know that I’ve got to go and sing for everybody, but remembering the songs and getting to remember all the words again, getting to say what I want to between the songs to the people, I really like that part. I don’t exactly thrash the way I used to because I have to keep my mind on remembering everything, but there’s a lot of different things to it. We’ve got about fifty shows under our belt now. Each time it’s a challenge but each time it’s getting better as well.

May The Rock Be With You: The album is called “Heavy Metal Music” which screams the obvious, but what was the idea behind the name specifically?

Jason: For clarity for the fans around the world. In METALLICA, and I was raised in that band, and it was always instilled in me that it’s a global view, it’s a worldwide view — we play music for the world not just the United States, so it’s kind of the way it’s gotta be. I’ve played in a lot of countries in my life, so no matter what language or dialect or whatever that you speak, heavy metal music means heavy metal music and I want to make sure that everybody’s clear that if I’m going to do this again and go all the way in frickin’ neck deep. I want to make sure that there’s question as to what style I’m playing. It’s not ECHOBRAIN, it’s not GOV’T MULE, not SEPULTURA, not DJ Shadow, not any of that stuff that I’ve messed with before, this is “Heavy Metal Music”.